Icecore

Carl Hobbes is not a terrorist. All he did was hack into Fort Knox—just to see if he could—but the US government tracked him down and offered a deal. If he'd answer some questions, he wouldn't be prosecuted and extradited to the United States for a trial. What they didn’t tell Carl was where the interrogation would take place: in Icecore, also known as the Guantánamo Bay of the North. It doesn’t matter that he’s only seventeen years old and a British citizen.

At Icecore, prisoners are kept in cages. Soldiers think Carl is a terrorist and have no problem roughing him up. His interrogators think he's lying about why he really hacked into Fort Knox.

If Carl ever wants to leave Icecore alive, he'll have to do it on his own. But how can a prisoner escape from an Arctic jail in the middle of nowhere when the temperature is always below zero degrees?

Action-packed and full of twists, Icecore delivers on its promise of excitement and thrills. It's similar in some ways to Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, in both politics and the hacker-imprisoned-by-the-US-government plot, but with fewer technological digressions. Each book has its own merits and flaws, but if you've enjoyed one, you should consider trying the other. If you haven't read either and are simply looking for a book with lots of action, Icecore is the one to go for.

Icecore was published in the United Kingdom under the title Inside the Cage with a different cover. Much more attention getting, and a pretty accurate representation of the book, too.

Icecore by Matt Whyman
published in the US by Atheneum
ISBN: 9781416949077